Donald ‘Wrong Way’ Trump Globalization has its challenges. But trying to return the 1950s is silly and impossible. see note please
http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-wrong-way-trump-1474841860
Mr. Blinder is a professor at Princeton, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and an informal adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign. rsk
One summer day in 1938, Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan took off from Brooklyn, N.Y., on a flight to Ireland—even though his flight plan called for going to California. Corrigan claimed he flew east rather than west by mistake—hence his nickname. But he was a skilled pilot, and people argue to this day whether he was a fool or a scoundrel whose request to fly to Ireland had been denied.
So it is with Donald Trump. He says so many ridiculous things that it’s hard to know when he’s displaying abysmal ignorance and when he’s deliberately lying. This ambiguity holds across the board, on virtually all issues and even on basic facts, but I’ll restrict myself to economic issues.
His signature policy remains building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, for which our southern neighbors will pay. But has anyone told him that the net migration flow across that long border has been southbound for years now? Yes, more people are crossing into Mexico than into the U.S. Wrong way, Donald.
Mr. Trump insists that the U.S. Treasury designate China a currency manipulator—meaning that Beijing is intervening in foreign-exchange markets to keep the yuan undervalued. That was probably true a few years ago, but it is pretty clear now that the yuan would depreciate if the Chinese let it float—making China an even fiercer competitor. Wrong way again, Donald.
Mr. Trump once stunned the financial world by declaring that “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.” A deal? Does that mean a partial default on U.S. debt—a very bad move for the world’s premier asset? And by the way, Mr. Trump’s spending and tax-cut proposals—which keep on coming—would raise the deficit by amounts that can only be called huge. Wrong way, Donald.
Climate change used to be something to which only scientifically minded policy wonks paid attention. Now it’s so palpable that even China has ratified the Paris agreement to limit carbon emissions. Yet Mr. Trump insists that climate change is a hoax. A hoax? Perpetrated by thousands of conspiring scientists in dozens of countries? You’d think that any sentient businessman would scoff at such an idea. Yet Mr. Trump rants on, trying to push the whole world the wrong way. CONTINUE AT SITE
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